Ok, I’m coming permanently out of “proper blogging” retirement. Why? The New Zealand government has decided to cut fuel taxes and RUC due to the “cost of living crisis” in New Zealand – egged on by the opposition and a range of New Zealand thinktanks and “thought leaders”. When a similar spike occurred in 2008 […]
Happy Valentine’s Day everyone, from Gulnara and myself. To celebrate we’ve put up a video characterising two different ways of thinking about gift giving – specifically the conflict between telling someone what gift you want and the nature of a surprise gift. People think and feel very differently about this, and fair enough we all […]
Walking down the street everyone is abuzz with the recent CPI numbers. 5.9% inflation! Someone’s failed! Economists are wrong for some reason! Freeze prices! Slash things! Destroy capitalists! Suppress workers! Random noises! I’ve heard it all. However, it made me realise something. I haven’t looked at the details of the CPI numbers for years. If […]
Seeing the price of haircuts rise, even relative to other things I might spend my money on, is the sort of thing to make an economist rail about anti-competitive behaviour. But is that really the case, or are higher haircut prices just a sign of a strengthening New Zealand economy? Gulnara and I have a […]
In a recent video Gulnara gave us some background of haggling in the former Soviet Union, and we tried to understand some of the way we could evaluate whether it is “good or bad” beyond the standard “haggling allows for optimal price discovery” vs “haggling adds transaction costs to trading”. The video can be found […]
In a recent video we’ve chatted about why cold and flu medication may be cheaper in winter than in summer – something that may seem a bit counter-intuitive. This was an issue discussed back in 2008 here and here. For those who aren’t keen on listening to videos, I’ve popped the transcript just below 😉